Foreign Landscapes

130701; 2010

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Volker Bertelmann, the German pianist/composer who records as Hauschka, likes to keep things small. His instrumental sketches rarely exceed the five-minute mark, and they completely eschew "big" dramatic moments. At their best, they function like a series of a wistful, drifty postcards from some middle memory of places and things. This approach served his 2008 album Ferndorf well enough; an homage to his childhood village in Germany, it's charmingly naive and occasionally bittersweet, something you could imagine nicely scoring a sentimental coming-of-age film.

Foreign Landscapes takes Ferndorf's chronicling principle on the road. The album consists of pieces inspired by locations around the world, from New York City's Union Square to Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Like its predecessors, it is scored mostly for three or four chamber musicians and Hauschka's piano, which he lightly prepares, John Cage-style, by placing objects on the strings. A colorful travelogue concept could be ideal for the prepared piano's wilder possibilities: in the right hands, it can resemble a Chinese zither, or a gamelan ensemble, or a horde of buzzing locusts. But Hauschka's preparation serves only to make his piano sound slightly more toylike; the result is that on Foreign Landscapes, the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira and the Japanese city Kamogawa come off sounding like the same quaint, sleepy little 18th century village square.

There are fleeting moments of prettiness in all of Hauschka's work; he has a wonderful ear for evocative bits of sound. But when he fails to find anywhere convincing to steer them, they don't leave lasting marks. "Alexanderplatz" opens with a pungent gypsy violin scored by some bracingly sour woodwinds; in "Iron Shoes", a violin sings a lovely almost-quote from the second movement Dvořák's famous "American" string quartet. Rather than build on this, however, Hauschka falls back on the same sprightly, anonymous churn all of his pieces eventually succumb to.

As a result, it becomes kind of hard to know what to do with his music, exactly. It doesn't reward close attention, but it doesn't fade successfully into the background, either; his arrangements are too scrappy and jostling for that. The strings and woodwinds often just sort of rattle around each other like loose parts in a shoebox, jolting the music to the forefront without doing much to command it once there, and it can make for a maddening listening experience, like someone tapping you insistently on the shoulder only to stare at you blankly when you finally turn around.

The best moments come when the tootling woodwinds and strings disappear, and Hauschka just lays out a pretty piano melody. The drunken, faux-Rachmaninov sway of "Mount Hood" is the album's richest piece, and the only work that makes truly compelling use of John Cage's prepared-piano technique. What sounds like a combination of pins, screws, and ping-pong balls bounce up and down on the strings while Hauschka plays a mournful minor-key piano steeped in pedal haze. The rickety, groaning sounds that result add an ineffable layer of sadness: It evokes the image of a pair of ghosts dancing together slowly on a sunken ship. It is the exception to the rule, unfortunately, and Foreign Landscapes enters a deadly boring lull before its second half and never recovers. The result has the energy of a cup of tea slowly going tepid in the Sunday afternoon sun.